I arrived at the café today, meeting my friend Tatyana, for our Monday writing practice. I didn’t have a specific topic to write about today, but I trusted something would emerge as we started talking about our week and what we are learning/reading. Of course, I threw 5 books into my bag just in case I still felt empty of a good idea.
We discussed a podcast that I listen to recently from Michael Singer, author of several books, his latest being Living Untethered. In this podcast he was speaking to a truth that both Tatyana and I live and practice every waking moment we remember to: the truth that we are pure awareness having a human experience. When we as human beings break free of our conditioning and reside in this awareness, we have access to levels of peace, clarity, and wisdom that cannot be generated by our brain alone.
Both of us are coaches who have given up supporting clients in having a better conditioning. Much of coaching and psychology is designed to give clients an upgraded ego or improved conditioning. The spiritual side of being human is left out of much of the professional works on offer in the industry. Her and I specialize in pointing clients to the truth of what they REALLY are (pure creative awareness) and THAT realization makes conditioning irrelevant. It provides a shortcut to the unlimited nature of human potential.
This is the typical topic of our get togethers before we get quiet and write. Life is the ultimate curriculum, and we are lifelong learners. We often share about the dramas we create in our minds and lives when we believe our conditioning. Yes, even professionals of this work have problems and get caught up in the delusion of ego daily. The best part of doing what I do for a living is I wake up quicker and suffer less because of conversations like this.
Tatyana made a comment to me that our conditioning is ongoing as we discussed the effects of COVID on our lives and our relationships.
Feeling unclear about what I wanted to write, I reached into my bag and pulled out a beloved book, Creator by Steve Chandler. I thumbed through well worn chapters covered in page markers and highlights and my eyes land on this:
“Conditioning never stops.
What I did and saw and learned this morning is as vital a part of my ongoing conditioning as the conditioning that occurred in my childhood”
The coincidence of finding this excerpt minutes after having the same conversation over coffee will not go un-noted by me.
Let’s talk about it.
We are in a constant dialogue with ourselves about what is happening both outside and inside of us. It’s ALL the time. We are constantly learning, making conclusions, labeling, evaluating, judging, etc. If we leave the kettle on the stove without any water we begin to wonder if we are losing our faculties to take care of ourselves as we age. We see a news story that our country will be destroyed if Republicans get control of the House, feel a rush of fear and decide that all Republicans are the enemy. An inch or two of fat around the middle means we will be without a loving partner forever. I am sure as you read this you can come up with a thing or two you are actively believing that is causing some upset in your experience. And absolutely, it is valuable to tell yourself a better story if you are able to do so. That is what I mean by upgrading your conditioning. It can be endless hard work to gather the deluge of beliefs and stories we are telling ourselves and re-authoring the totality of our experience, because conditioning never ends. We are human, and we have a brain that is designed to make conclusions and believe its predictions.
When we do the spiritual recovery of remembering the pure creative awareness that we are beyond the noise of conditioning, it cuts through the bullshit like a hot knife through butter. Awareness doesn’t believe anything, needs nothing and knows nothing. It is simply aware, and yet an infinite source of peace and well-being. From this view we recognize the fiction of our conditioning and allow a natural wisdom flow that can respond to every moment we find ourselves in. Waking up and calling BS on our conditioning doesn’t mean that we stop thinking. It just means we use our thinking in a way that will work for us not against us. We can create more of what we want and less of what we don’t want. We must be in a constant state of shedding the conditioning that is ongoing. Conditioning is psychological, awareness is spiritual. Residing in our pure awareness gives us the spiritual clarity and power to override the dramas of psychological conditioning that is always going on.
